Bubble Meter is a national housing bubble blog dedicated to tracking the continuing decline of the housing bubble throughout the USA. It is a long and slow decline. Housing prices were simply unsustainable. National housing bubble coverage. Please join in the discussion.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Washington, DC metro area foreclosures

A picture is worth a thousand words:

These are the foreclosed homes currently for sale. Click on the image to see a full-size version. It looks like it says 307 in Washington, DC, 287 in Alexandria, VA, and 340 in Manassas, VA.

12 comments:

"Commuting makes people unhappy, or so many studies have shown. Recently, the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger asked nine hundred working women in Texas to rate their daily activities, according to how much they enjoyed them. Commuting came in last. (Sex came in first.) The source of the unhappiness is not so much the commute itself as what it deprives you of. When you are commuting by car, you are not hanging out with the kids, sleeping with your spouse (or anyone else), playing soccer, watching soccer, coaching soccer, arguing about politics, praying in a church, or drinking in a bar. In short, you are not spending time with other people. The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. You have cup holders for company.

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”"

I read the full article mentioned above, and I tend to agree. Is it any wonder that we see such angry comments here from people who staunchly defend their decisions to commute 90 minutes each way for the 'pleasure' of mowing a big lawn on the weekends? And how far does that 90 minutes get you, anyway? 30 miles?

Those foreclosed homes in PW county are going to leap across the boundary and drive the Fairfax county's housing values through the basement floor."

Really? You sure about that? Thing is, last time I checked, Fairfax has been improving. 6 months ago, Fairfax was averaging about 1 in 250, 3 months ago, it was about 1 in 300, now its about 1 in 400.

Arlington next door to Fairfax has been holding rock solid at 1 in 1000 for over a year now. If anything it looks like the low foreclosure rate in Arlington is pulling Fairfax foreclose rates back to a more moderate pace!

Also, PWC was actually closer to 1 in 80 homes in foreclosure 6 months ago. Now PWC is actually a bit closer to 1 in 150. Could it be that fairfax is now yanking PWC back from the depths? We shall see.